iTunes - all songs have lost file path

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Level 1

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iTunes - all songs have lost file path

This is the 3rd time this has happened to me. All of my music files are located on my external hard drive and have been for over a year. I open iTunes today and all of a sudden, all of my songs (over 3500) have the gray exclamation point on the left side of the song title, indicating the filepath for each song cannot be located.

But of course all of the song files still exist in the exact same location as they have been for the past year. I have made no adjustments or changes to either my iPod, my computer or my hard drive. Other than manually going through each song and music file folder to "re-import" each to iTunes, is there a way to retrain iTunes to search for the songs in a certain folder?

Does anyone know why this so very frustrating phenomenon occurs?

Thank you,
Rence

Windows XP

Posted on Jan 7, 2007 4:53 PM

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Answer 1

Enemzo

Level 1

5 points

Jan 7, 2007 7:01 PM in response to Rence

I just put them onto an external harddrive and now I can't even figure out how to change the path. I have tried so many times and I have like 7000+ songs so I'm not gonna do them individually. I'm gonna go jump off a building.

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Answer 2

Rence Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 8, 2007 6:19 PM in response to Enemzo

When I converted to an external hard drive, I had to do the same thing. Double-click on each song and then pick the correct file path.

I have to think that somehow there is a way to tell iTunes where to search for the songs on a different drive than when they were first downloaded. This is what we need.

Don't pick a tall building - I have hope that someone will resolve our issue.

Rence

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Answer 3

Jan 8, 2007 7:21 PM in response to Rence

Are you sure that the drive letter of the external hard drive did not change? This can happen if more than one device is connected -- e.g. a USB flash drive in addition to the external HD -- or an iPod.

You may have to change the drive letter of the external HD back to what it was.

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Answer 4

Rence Author

Level 1

0 points

Jan 10, 2007 6:52 PM in response to Robert Jacobson1

Thank you for the reply. You may be onto something here. The only think I have changed is the port I have plugged my external hard drive into. However, my external is still the F: drive, meaning the path to my song files should not have changed.

Just to try everying, I have tried plugging my external drive into every USB port. Unfortunately, I still receive the message that the song files cannot be located.

Any additional advice which may help? Is there a way to tell iTunes where to look for song files?

Thanks, Rence

Are you sure that the drive letter of the external
hard drive did not change? This can happen if more
than one device is connected -- e.g. a USB flash
drive in addition to the external HD -- or an iPod.

You may have to change the drive letter of the
external HD back to what it was.

Reply

Answer 5

Jan 10, 2007 9:40 PM in response to Rence

i had the same problem earlier today... i thought the external harddrive letter had changed, but when i checked, it was still the same...

what i did was deleted all the files from itunes and re-imported them... it's easy if u have all ur songs saved in a specific location...

it's under file>add folder to... then u just choose the folder, if there are many subfolders in the main folder, it will add the songs from there too

i was kinda worried that i may have to fix up the songs and how they look, but itunes remembered all my subtle changes... so it was a quick process

the only tedious thing was that i had to fix up all the playlists that i had created manually... other than that, everything is operational once again for me...

hope this helps u guys somewhat

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